Musings and the occasional bit of poetry on Christianity & church topics.

Who has pottered by this way, then?

Thursday, April 12, 2012

A Vision of Church?

Vision
of Church

I
was on holiday with my family in Scarborough this week. It was a
great, relaxing time with unexpectedly lovely weather which we all
really needed for one reason or another. We were staying at the Grand
Hotel and noticed there seemed to be a lot of conference delegates
wearing orange lanyards staying there too. These folk turned out to be on the ECGConference, which (according to a flyer we found in one of the
communal areas) is a Christian conference offering a week of all-age worship, Bible study, debates, children's activities, training, seminars and all manner of good
stuff for enthusing, equipping and building up people to send back out into their ministry. I then noticed ECG popping up in my Twitter feed because of
mutual friends - you know how this works sometimes - but took a
policy decision not to get involved as I was on holiday. As a family
we need to rest, and that includes unplugging from my own ministry, I was
sure. Yes, absolutely, I was sure this was the correct response to being cheek by jowl
with ECG.

And then I had a vision one morning. I compromised...

It's now Thursday evening. I'm back home from my holiday and didn't get
distracted by ECG this week. Apart from the vision, that is. But ECG are still there
doing their thing, so I am blogging my vision now. I
don't know what their seminar contents are or whether this is
relevant to them, but I have "one of those feelings" that
someone there might need to read this, so here goes...

I
awoke early on Tuesday April 10th, and not because of the seagulls.
This was in the pre-seagull quiet of dawn. As is my custom I said the Daily Office then finished reading Luke's Gospel as part of my daily
reading plan. I waited on God prayerfully. After a few minutes, a
very vivid vision unfolded.

The
following are my notes made immediately afterwards and edited just now only to make more grammatical and for clarity:

An
immense shape appears - so huge you cannot see all of it - rising up
from the landscape, looming over the landscape but not coming out of
it as such, more a distinct presence among the panorama of the South
Bay of Scarborough, including the Spa Conference centre and Grand
Hotel. It's shape is indescribable: very beautiful and with many
surfaces, colours, textures and materials. Some parts are jewelled,
some are rough, some glass and see-through, some shiny, some opaque,
and all of this is visible in incredible detail, far beyond what I
could have really made out with the naked eye had I been seeing it in
the flesh. It is astonishingly beautiful and I cannot for the life of
me say why as it is almost formless, shapeless, artless in its
construction, impossible to say which way is up, where it begins or
ends. It is architecturally incoherent. It is absolutely, indescribably huge.

I
say to myself, "Is this a good thing or a distraction? Is it
from God or not?"

And
I hear the answer as another question, "What would a child
think?"

A
child would see it is beautiful too. It's attractive, there is lots
to get involved with, many ways of seeing it but almost impossible to
see all at once. The outside is what we see, in all its weird variety and, as I look closely I see that there are pathways,
handrails, tracks leading in from every surface, every part of it, continuing
around the structure and leading further into it.

Accept it as a
child, then.

All
the surfaces have a way into the centre, into the heart of it. All
the surfaces are a way in potentially. I muse that you could still
admire or decry this thing from the outside without actually
exploring it or engaging with it.

I
look at it with my youngest daughter. She is drawn to different faces
of it to those I noticed most. She sees coloured, see-through,
glass-like flowers with layers of other shapes in different colours
nestled behind. I had seen grander, more stained-glass-like
structures at first. The whole thing is historic and huge, ancient,
but very new; very old indeed and changing, moving all the time,
never still, always in the "now". On looking again, I see parts which don't attract me at
all: dull surfaces, odd angles and shapes which say nothing to me at
all. They all lead into the same structure though.

And
the image faded and the seagulls began their racket. And I knew I had
seen a vision of the Universal Church throughout all ages and was shaking in wonder. I needed to think, reflect and pray on this.

On
Wednesday morning, I prayed through this vision. The sheer variety of
the appearance of the Church was wonderful. Just imagine the sheer
variety of expressions of what it means to be Church in ages past
through to the present and in cultures worldwide! Many of these
expressions of Church will be unattractive to us. Some will be,
frankly, incomprehensible. That's all good. We are whom we are, here and now. That is true for God's people throughout history, and our Church will not look like theirs and will not even look like our contemporaries' either. Whenever we think of
equipping ourselves and our churches for ministry and mission, we can
lose sight of the fact that the Holy Spirit, on whom we rely for that
equipping, is a wild goose that blows where it will and,
as this vision reminds us, shapes the Church in more ways than we can
possibly imagine.

You only have to read Paul's epistles to see how
varied even the early church was: the sheer variety of the issues
Paul deals with pastorally in these letters, and the variety of focus
in his teaching in order to equip each Christian community for its
life and ministry together tells us that they were not identical in
character. God meets people where they are, not where we think they ought to be. The Church has to reflect that reality.

So, as we listen for God's voice, pray for equipping and
invite the Holy Spirit to work in us and our churches, we do so in
humility, knowing that we are not creating a blueprint for every
church. We are called to shape our facet of the Church into something
beautiful, but something which is part of a far more awesome whole.

I
feel sure that this vision of a beautiful, attractive yet infinitely
varied Universal Church is reflected in the variety of people
attending ECG this week in Yorkshire, in the varied communities they
live in and seek to reach with the Gospel and in the churches and
groups which they will return to. May God bless them all and the beautiful
facets of His church they seek to create.